Nope, that's phase 4 onward. Phase 3 is mainly testing the PS3 client and the character import stuff. I'd still advise you to check it out though.

Any idea what happens if we delete one of our 1.0 characters during Phase 3?

Nothing. They'll be wiping before phase 4 and restoring 1.0 characters from their original save state. You've got 4 character slots each server for beta, so no idea why you'd want to nuke 1 old character.

I don't at the moment, but I do want to recreate one of them eventually and was wondering when the best time to do so would be.

Well Phase 3 is a good time to just kind of fuck around with the character creator and get your bearings before phase 4 begins. Honestly, I think it's going to be a clusterfuck on Thursday with how many people will be trying to get in.They're supposed to launch a new benchmark that features character creation with an import feature into retail, so we shall see how that goes.

Since we're all waiting for Phase 3 to start, I found an excellent storyline synopsis of ver. 1.0 with pics and video on Dual Shockers. It's great reading/viewing for those of you who want to get some point of reference before starting the beta test, and a really good refresher for those of us who played through it.

It doesn't use DX11? That seems odd. I'm not techy enough to know what that means for the average player though.

Not alot of games really use most of the DX11 features, plus only video cards released in the last two years really support it. If they're making a true full DX11 version of the game, it will be a noticeable improvement on what we have now. I can see that at the time it didn't really make sense because it would have alienated players even further who didn't have really good PCs even more than the original release did.

Last bit of thread spam for the night, but important for anyone using an NVIDIA card planning to play phase 3 on Fri. Do not use the current 320.18 WHQL drivers as it seems to be a bit of an unstable lemon with alot of games. Instead, use the previous drivers 314.22 WHQL. I did the benchmark and saw a 500+ point difference with rolling back to the 314.22 WHQL. Afterburner reported more GPU usage % (93% vs. 75%) with the older drivers as well, but better fan speeds and temps. Bizarre but the numbers are there. had alot less hang ups and tears on some of my other games too. Anyway, anyone using Vista 64, Win7 64, or Win 8 64 can find the driver here. Just make sure to choose "Custom" and "Clean Install" when you run the executable.

EDIT - For weekend test 1 in Phase 3, we will be on... Leviathan! Shocker!